My Lords, I thank the noble Lord, Lord Leigh of Hurley, for his very useful intervention. As someone who is a doyen of the corporate finance industry and whose business office is just round the corner from my own, I am aware that his reputation is very distinguished in these matters.
Indeed, I thank the noble Lord for what he had to say in relation to incentive payments and their provision in the code as overseen by the Takeover Panel. As I said, this takes forward an existing arrangement that incentive payments be identified and I hope there was some genius in our crafting that allowed it to extend slightly further than just the situation, if there was to be a situation, with an offer where payments were to be considered during the course of a transaction, as is sometimes the case, that they would also have to be disclosed in some format. It is also why I referred to whether there should be some reason to report after the fact as well.
I am very grateful to the Minister for her responses to this, which were very helpful. I want to make a couple of things very clear. We will consider her comments much more carefully. It is certainly true that one wants to make sure that any disclosure is meaningful and that there is very limited boilerplating—as we have both been in business we know an awful lot of boilerplating takes place. Currently, I would say from this side we see that the argument could be applied to both situations equally but we will take that back and consider it further.
In relation to the incentive payments, that is an invitation that will be very hard to resist and over time I am sure that we will come forward with that. In general, the advisory market is probably one—even though this may well be a case of poacher-cum-gamekeeper too much—where the whole market requires some broader assessment and elements of competition and transparency in that would be not unopportune. However, this is not the time for that and these are matters that we may return to in due course. In the current circumstances I beg leave to withdraw the amendment.